“What’s so easy about Saturday mornings?”
That question, asked by an elderly friend, caught me off guard because I wasn’t sure what she was talking about.
“Do you mean Sunday morning?” I responded, thinking she might be referring to the popular 1970s song by the Commodores, where Lionel Richie sang, “I’m easy like Sunday morning.”
It turned out she was, except she had the day wrong and didn’t believe me when I pointed that out. She kept insisting the lyric was “easy like Saturday morning,” until I Googled the song and played it on my phone.
That song is not one where the lyrics are difficult to discern, so I’m not sure how she mixed that up, but she insisted she had always heard it as Saturday morning and had been confused by it for almost 50 years.
There is one point in the song where Richie does hesitate ever so slightly between the words Sunday and morning, so I can kind of understand how someone might, if they think he said the word pretty fast, mistake Sunday for Saturday.
But that’s not like thinking Jimi Hendrix is saying “’Scuse me while I kiss this guy” in Purple Haze instead of “kiss the sky,” or that Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival says, “There’s a bathroom on the right,” instead of “Bad moon on the rise.”
I had one of those moments myself a couple weeks ago. During the intro to the song “Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp, I have always thought that vocalist Roger Hodgson said, “Here we go, man.” The high-pitched tone of his voice, the phrasing and that line itself epitomize the mid-to-late 1970s to me.
But when I mentioned that to someone as that song came on a couple weeks ago, she said she thought he was saying, “Here we go again.”
So, I again turned to Google, and sure enough, the word Hodgson says is “Here we go again,” not “Here we go, man.”
It’s a strange sensation to have a piece of your personal soundtrack rewritten by a search engine, but even worse than that, I somehow enjoy that song, which I have loved for a long time, a little less now. My image of that song went from a laid-back, California-cool vibe to something a little less carefree.
There’s actually a name for mishearing lyrics: mondegreens. That word itself never made sense to me until just now, as I was writing this. I searched Google once again to ask where that word comes from. If that can be believed, in 1954 a writer named Sylvia Wright misheard a line in a Scottish ballad, “laid him on the green,” as “Lady Mondegreen.”
I’ve never heard that song, but just from reading the lyric, I can see how you’d hear it that way.
My friend ultimately decided “Easy” made more sense once she realized the song actually says Sunday. Meanwhile, my ear still hears “man” every time I hear the guitar kick in on “Give a Little Bit.”
I think it probably always will.
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